2025 marks a change in focus.

In 2024, the Religion stream sort of petered out. In 2025 we’ll retire it in full. The existing essays will stay there, for the most part, but there won’t be anything new. Instead, we’ll focus centrally on games and culture. That’s really the headline – I’ll give some more context and background below.

This website started in 2016 as a way to research religion and video games, which was the field for my Masters. I would write essays on alternating topics – first twice a week, then once a week from 2022. In 2024 it’s been a little patchy, with most months getting about three essays total. Really that’s because of the religion stream. For the last couple years, I’ve written roughly fifty essays each year – twenty-five on religion, and twenty-five on video games. This year, to 1 December, the religion stream has only seen six. That’s the gap.

In terms of where we were meant to be, we should have been nearing the end of my current five-year block (2021-2025). That block was meant to be about Christianity in the 20th century. I would look at the three major denominations – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant – and finish with a focus on Christianity and social justice, looking at how Christianity has responded to things like feminism and postcolonialism. I got through the Catholics and the Orthodox, but the Protestants were slow going, and social justice hasn’t happened.

The reasons really crystallised with that no contact essay in September. There was this New Yorker article about adult kids who stop talking to their parents – it was a slightly anxious piece written by a new parent who clearly connected with the topic from the parents’ perspective.  What if it happens to me? What happens if my kids don’t want to talk to me any more?  The whole thing was driven by that lopsided anxiety, leading to some weird arguments and framing. Estrangement can happen “because of one fight,” we’re told, “for example, after a parent rejects an L.G.B.T.Q. child when they come out.” There’s no sense of shame, no concern for how the child might feel – it’s written for parents and against ungrateful kids.

Anyway, the thing bothered me, so I wrote about it. I broke it into chunks and worked through it piece by piece, trying to better understand my own reaction and how I was feeling. And my conclusion was that I didn’t want to write about religion any more. It became very suddenly a farewell.

I think growing up in a conservative Christian home, and obviously moving out of that space, on some level part of the past nine years has been about processing what Christianity means – both what it means to me personally and what it means to us as a society. What role does the faith have in the modern day? Does it have anything left? Is it exhausted? They’re important questions, but – I’m just not troubled by them any more.

So there are two things going on: in terms of my own journey with this topic, I’m at a natural stopping point, and on a practical level, I think I’ve completed a fairly reasonable body of work. We’ve talked about some interesting things, my writing has improved, and I think there are some resources there for people who want to know more. Of course there’s always more to read, always odd little characters lurking down the alley – in the meantime I hope it’s given people something to think about. I hope it paints a broader picture of the weird diversity of the faith. In 2025, Death is a Whale will be about games, art and culture. I wish you well – I’ll see you next year.